A Native perspective: TurtleIsland.social vs. Bluesky Part 1

Both have pros and cons, let’s start with background

For background, most people reading this understand that X (formerly Twitter) and Meta (Instagram and Facebook) are owned by slimeball MAGA billionaires and are very disrespectful to BIPOC and left of center people. I’m not going to expound on that.

That said, for many it is difficult to disengage from X and Meta for a variety of reasons. Primarily BIPOC communities, institutions and brands. Institutions ranging from government to brands to entertainment stars, etc. are deeply embedded in commercial social media.

For me, Facebook is hard to ditch. As an off the rez urban Native, it is a primary information connection to my Native Nation and its resources, and other important Indian country tribal information. Many Native people, especially creatives are deeply connected to Instagram. X as disgusting as it is, is still the go to place for at this moment news and official government information etc.

BIPOC communities can be significant on all those platforms. Many Native people and organizations have thousands and thousands of followers. In most cases, those followers are not just numbers but real important community members. There are many personal and business relationships that you just don’t throw away without pain, or even total destruction.

TurtleIsland.social is born

In my mind, October 27, 2022 was the seminal moment, when Elon Musk bought Twitter. Within a week or so, in November of 2022, my favorite relative Tzipporah and I joined a Mastodon instance. Within a month, we decided to operate our own instance and on December 5, 2022, what was to become TurtleIsland.social was alive. A short stint as Mvskoke.social was too narrowly focused we decided. We switched to Woodpecker.social which was great, but even though woodpeckers were important medicine birds to us, it didn’t ring out as a Native Indigenous instance to others, so on July 19, 2023 the final configuration of TurtleIsland.social opened. This has been super, and won’t change.

On September 10, 2023, TurtleIsland.social moved to managed hosting, a huge step forward in reliability, performance and expandability. This also freed up a lot of my time allowing me to concentrate more on building community instead of system administration. The upshot was now we had the best possible Mastodon instance. We were ready for high demand or celebrity users. The sky was the limit for Native owned and operated social media.

The most important facts here: TurtleIsland.social is a Native owned and operated Mastodon instance. Beyond that, there are already over 8000 Mastodon instances. Billionaire corporate independence is a reality today.

Bluesky is born

There has been a lot written about this that I won’t duplicate, but Bluesky opened registrations to the general public on February 6, 2024, a year after its release as an invite-required beta. I think everyone knows that Bluesky came from the belly of Twitter, and is a traditional billionaire owned tech company. All the typical billionaire social media risks apply to Bluesky. In standard corporate baloney fashion, Bluesky touts itself as “billionaire-proof”, but real hurdles to this imaginary freedom exist. Especially for BIPOC people, the cost for entry is too high. It is not realistic to fork off from Bluesky. But for now, Bluesky is left of center leaning and friendly to BIPOC people.

The most important facts here: Bluesky is a centralized platform, meaning it is owned and operated by a single billionaire drenched entity. The imagined “billionaire-proof” freedom Bluesky touts is a pipe dream.

TurtleIsland.social and Bluesky provide new ways forward

At this point in time, I consider both TurtleIsland.social and Bluesky to be essential for Native/Indigenous social media experiences. Ordinarily I try to think forward 7 generations, but I don’t think any specific social media will last that long. However I do think it is worthwhile to consider what will happen over the next 10 or 20 years. Seriously, today there is a lot of pressure on social media and all forms of news and information to succumb not only to billionaire whims, but to a quickly degrading fascist US government as well.

Fortunately, TurtleIsland.social servers are in France.

Thanks!
-Yehuda

This link will become live when Part 2 is released shortly:
A Native perspective: TurtleIsland.social vs. Bluesky Part 2

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